Tindersticks have announced their latest album, Soft Tissue, which comes out September 13 via City Slang. It’s led by the single ‘New World’. Check it out and find the album’s cover art and tracklist below.
The music video for ‘New World’, as well as the album cover, were made by bandleader Stuart Staples’ daughter Sidonie Osborne Staples. “Sid was making these tiny ceramic characters, so I asked her to make some of the band,” he explained. “Later I wrote this song ‘New World’ about somehow trying make sense of this strange world I felt developing around me and these little guys came back into my mind — Let’s take them on a stop motion journey across a strange land, from the barren rocks to the bountiful fruit that is not familiar and maybe poisonous. Sid put the landscapes together and moved the figures, millimeters at a time. Neil Fraser took the photographs, we edited as we went along.”
Discussing the album, Staples added:
‘Baby I was falling, but the shit that I was falling through. Thought it was just the world rising.’ These are the opening lines of the album, it seems all the songs on ‘Soft Tissue’ inhabit this confusion somehow – despairing at the destruction, suspecting you are responsible.
Musically, it seemed that since 2016’s ‘The Waiting Room’, the band’s output had been reactionary. The last two tindersticks have been so opposed to each other – 2019’s ‘No Treasure But Hope’ was an extremely naturalistic recording process – due in part as a reaction to the previous few years of experimental projects (High Life, Minute Bodies) and in turn as a reaction to this purity 2021’s ‘Distractions’ became one of the bands most dense, experimental albums.
It felt like time to stop lurching to these extremes and to find a way to marry the rigor of the songwriting and the joy of the band playing together with a more hard-nosed experimental approach.
Soft Tissue Cover Artwork:
Soft Tissue Tracklist:
1. New World
2. Don’t Walk, Run
3. Nancy
4. Falling, The Light
5. Always a Stranger
6. The Secret of Breathing
7. Turned My Back
8. Soon to be April
